


Buying Time

by KrisLaughs



Category: Bourne (Movies), Bourne Legacy (2012), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M, M/M, circus twins - verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-23
Updated: 2012-08-23
Packaged: 2017-11-12 17:49:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KrisLaughs/pseuds/KrisLaughs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Clint and Natasha play guardian angels in Manila, Phil lets them go, and Aaron may end up the wiser for it. </p><p>  <i>"There’ll be hell to pay because there’s always a hefty price for freedom, but we’ll pay it with smiles on our faces. So will he. And then, after the dust clears and the bodies are counted, the sun will still rise, he still won’t remember you, and it’s going to be alright. How’s that for platitudes?" Natasha asks him.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Buying Time

After some gentle persuasion by Natasha, Phil agrees to help. Strictly off the books, of course.

Chickens squawk and children cry and men are shouting in Tagalog all around them. “Thank you,” Clint tells him, as they part ways at the edge of a busy market. He hopes Phil can tell that this time he really means it. 

Couson takes his shoulder. “If anyone sees you,” he says. He doesn’t have to add that it would be an interdepartmental nightmare of epic proportions if Clint even leaves a sliver of DNA behind him. His smile is soft, though, and Clint wonders if this isn’t about more than just the hypothetical paperwork. “I mean it. Be careful.”

Clint and Tasha nod and disappear into the shadows. Phil radios back to the waiting helicopter and disappears into the crowd. 

“Well,” Natasha smirks and leaps up a low-hanging gutter and lands lightly on a corrugated roof. She holds out a hand. “Shall we?”

~

It was Fury who first got news of the situation. 

Clint didn’t like to remember the last time he was called into this particular office. The bank of flat screens on the far wall was blank, and no one was there to judge his actions. Nonetheless, he walked a little straighter and could feel the tension in the back of his jaw. 

Fury glanced up from his computer, then stood and moved to the front of the desk. “Thought you should know, they’ve pulled the plug on Outcome,” was all he said. He was neither satisfied, nor sad. Just Fury. 

Clint’s vision dimmed a little around the edges. He might’ve stumbled back towards the door. “Ken—Aaron?” he asked. 

Fury’s eye closed once in sympathy. “Terminated,” he said. “Along with the remaining five assets, six scientists and—“ 

“No. He’s not.” Clint was sure he’d know if—“He’s not. He’s alright,” he said out loud, and he didn’t particularly care, today, if it landed him back in psych evaluations. Even after this many years with no contact, he’d know if anything happened to Cross. 

Yeah, he’d know.

~

Their ear buds are tapped into each other’s, the helipad in case of emergency, and the local police chatter. It’s a distracting buzz on the edge of his senses. He hopes Natasha is paying more attention than he is. 

They skim over rooftops, above the ebb and flow of the crowds on the streets, right where he’s normally most comfortable. Only this mission is anything but normal. He keeps glancing behind, but so far, their tail is clear. The night air is sticky, and the tin is slick under their feet. 

“Hey,” she tells him, as they hunker down beside a drain pipe across from the production plant. “It’s going to be alright.”

“You don’t usually traffic in platitudes,” he reminds her. The building is quiet. No one’s raised the alarm. Yet. He reminds himself to trust Aaron, but his bow is notched and ready.

“Okay, fine.” She doesn’t smile. Her voice is low and husky in the dark. “This is a shit show to the extreme in the humidest damn city north of the Equator. We’re only here because you have an absurdly strong but endearing, really, sense of loyalty to a guy you haven’t spoken to since you were adolescents not to mention the fact that Coulson’s a softie with a weak spot for super soldiers. And for you.

"Your brother has finally got away from the guys who owned him after Iraq, not that you meant to have him recruited by those particular assholes. Still, you have to admit this is better than the death he was stumbling towards. He managed to kidnap a scientist they’d rather have dead. He’s working to make whatever they’ve done to him permanent. There’ll be hell to pay because there’s always a hefty price for freedom, but we’ll pay it with smiles on our faces. So will he. And then, after the dust clears and the bodies are counted, the sun will still rise, he still won’t remember you, and it’s going to be alright. How’s that for platitudes?” 

Clint almost smiles, a bitter smile despite himself. He lowers the infrared goggles to check on some motion in the northeast corridor. “It’ll do.”

~

“Manila,” Phil had said six hours ago. “That’s where he’s headed, smart bugger. I can stall Langley, but not for long. They’re pissed. Just so you know.”

“More than you can handle?” Tash asked sweetly.

“Just give me five.” Phil didn’t miss a beat, and Clint didn’t try to hide his relief. Phil spoke into his headset. “Patch me in to security at JFK.”

“How soon can we be there?” Clint asked.

Phil cupped the receiver for just a moment. “In this thing? Less than an hour.” Then he spoke back into his mic. “Hi, Jameson? Yeah. Remember that favor you owed me?” 

~

Clint kills the local cell tower with a single shot and hopes he’s bought them enough time. From what he understands, the biotechnology they need really is here. It just hasn’t been tested yet. He hopes it’s close enough to field-ready for Aaron. “What do you know about this Shearing doctor?”

“I’ve read her file. She’s good, and I don’t think she’s working double for any agency. She wasn't lead on the project, but she did most of the heavy lifting. She knows the virus, built it from the ground up. She'll make it work for him, if it can be done.”

“You didn’t see him last time,” he tells Natasha. He can still remember Kenneth, Aaron already, as pale as the sheets twisted around his legs, pulling in one slow, agonized breath after another as the virus infected every cell, the sheen of sweat over his skin and the purple bruises under his eyes. 

Natasha shakes her head. “You weren’t supposed to be watching him, either.”

“It was a two-key encryption with fingerprint access, easy enough to hack into.” Really, the facility was pretty much begging to be burgled. 

“If your print is already a near-match.”

He shrugs. They watch the factory in silence for a while. The guard who let Aaron and Shearing in is pacing back and forth like he’s trying to make up his mind about something. Clint doesn’t like the look and is about to take the guy out when he feels a hand on his weapon.

“You’d only attract more attention,” she says. “They need all the time they can get.”

“You think it’ll work?” he asks. 

“You think it’ll make him happy?” she responds.

Clint pauses before answering. “He always was, as a kid.”

“In an institution?” Her voice is hard with old memories. 

“It wasn’t like that. It was the only place he knew.” He shrugs. “Things changed as he got older. He wanted to do something with his life.” Clint blinks, hard, to clear his vision. There’s a siren in the distance. City like this, it could be anything. He doesn’t hear any chatter over the comm. “He always wanted to be a hero. Probably read too many comics growing up.”

“Comics you brought him.”

“He wasn’t… books weren’t really his thing. And I couldn’t visit that often.” There weren’t many people who knew he’d visited ever. Natasha was one. Phil was another. He’d avoided the nursing staff like the plague—they always looked at him like… like he was his brother. Or worse. 

“You told him you were a soldier.”

“Seemed to make more sense than the truth. I figured I could keep an eye on him if he could enlist. Took a while to find a recruiter willing to fudge the paperwork, though.” Clint had foolishly expected him to end up as a sharpshooter--an uncanny ability to judge distance and angle and speed the one thing other than a face they shared. He never expected his brother to patrol over the ass-end of a roadside bomb, or to ever be in the same room as Eric Byer. 

There’s a flare of gunfire from a lower window. They leap to attention. “You keep watch,” Tash tells him. “I’m going in.”

“But if we get separated, how will you—“

“You think I can’t tell the two of you apart?” She rolls her eyes and disappears over the ledge they’d been crouching behind. 

Clint flexes his fingers and waits. 

There must be an inside line, because he can hear the back and forth on their radios now. Clint fits his bow with rusty nails fixed to shafts designed to dissolve on contact. He takes out two police vehicle tires at ten blocks. It may buy them a minute or two. 

An alarm goes off inside the building, and the street begins to fill with pink-hooded workers. 

Natasha reappears. 

“Kid’s smarter than you give him credit for,” she says. “Time to make ourselves scarce. They’ll make it out of here.” She smiles reassuringly, and they disappear over the rooftops.

~

“God, I barely remember a word of Tagalog,” Tash says. "It's a good thing she speaks English." Her head is veiled, so her pale skin and flaming hair stand out less in the crowd. She’s spoken to the woman who owns the building, negotiating room, board and silence for the couple on their way here. 

Clint has been following them, suppressing every urge to drop down into the street and help Dr. Shearing carry his brother to the safehouse. Natasha watched them the first hour they spent fleeing the warehouse alarms and just grinned when he asked again whether Shearing could be trusted. 

Tash could always read people better than he could. 

Skimming over the rooftops on soft-soled feet, he gritted his teeth while Aaron stumbled down the street. His brother’s face was carefully lined and soft around the edges, even as his body was hard as a soldier’s. He gave Shearing directions until he couldn’t anymore. 

By sunrise, he was leaning against a wall, breathing hard, and they’d only made it halfway across the city. Whatever she’d given him back at the factory had gotten to work quickly in his body. 

“See anywhere likely?” Clint had asked Natasha. 

She'd scouted a nondescript hostel and radioed for intel on its owner. The woman was middle-aged and in need of cash. Natasha paid and promised more if she waved down the tourists making their slow progress up the street. 

The proprietoress plays her part. Aaron is shivering like an Autumn leaf by the time they make it haltingly up the stairs. Bad fish, Shearing explains. She lays him in the room’s only small cot. Aaron moans like every joint aches and reaches for her like a bind man.

Clint tucks himself into the shadow of a window ledge across the street and continues to watch. He can’t hear what they're talking about, but Shearing shakes her head and helps Aaron ease back down to the lumpy pillows. She holds his hand long after he’s drifted into a troubled sleep. 

~

“We’ve got trouble,” Tash hisses behind him.

Clint rouses himself from a semi-daze and looks up at her. 

“LARX. They sent fucking LARX. They really are pissed.”

Clint wishes for a moment that he could call Phil, get Steve Rodgers here, anything. But then he’d have to tell the rest of the team about Aaron, and he isn’t ready for that yet. Even if he was, they’d probably destroy the city saving him, and he isn’t ready to have that on his conscience, either. He sighs, stands and stretches. “How far?” he asks. 

“Just landed.”

Just landed is far too close. He pulls a shirt from his pack, something Aaron would wear, and slips it over his blacks. 

“Where’re we going?”

“You’re watching over him. LARX will recognize me, my face, anyway. I'll take him on a wild goose chase. Kill him if I have to, if I have half a chance.” He smiles with a lightheartedness he doesn’t really feel because that’s really what this mission is about. Be a ghost, find more time, disappear. Give Ken, Aaron, every chance to make it out of here alive and whole. 

“I don’t like this, Barton.” 

“You don’t have to.” He scales the roof they’ve been crouched on and heads in the direction of the airport. 

~

Natasha is coiled and tense when he returns. Her fist is bloody, and he wonders who took it on the nose. In a moment, he sees why. There’s cops down the street, more down the one beside that. 

“Shit,” he says. “How is he?”

“About the same.”

He takes a deep breath. It’s the strangest feeling, this calm in the middle of battle. The farther things spiral, the slower his heart beats. He nods once and pulls off the sweaty tee.

“LARX?”

“Bought it for a little. Must’ve heard the ten-call ‘cause he broke off the chase and turned this way. Who gave away their position?”

“Brother.”

“You let him know how you feel about that?” He indicates her hand. 

She rubs the raw knuckles. “Of course I did. Just a little too late.”

“Any other action?”

“Shearing left to find a pharmacy.”

“Good. I’m going in.”

“Clint…”

He’s already found a secure wire that spans the street, and years of tightrope walking pay off as he pads across it, dropping to the roof on the other side, while Natasha murmurs her objections in her foulest Russian.

It’s short work to find his way down the tight hallway and to pop the lock to their room. It smells of unwashed bodies and overnight sick. Threadbare curtains wave in the weak breeze. There’s a fan running over Aaron's bare skin, and the street sounds are oddly hushed in here. Clint avoids the windows and makes his way over the bed. 

Aaron is curled on his side. His breathing is shallow but even. His eyes are puffy, but the fever is breaking. Clint whispers his name.

Aaron’s hands flex, a gesture so similar to his own, he feels like he’s looking through a funhouse mirror at himself, at all the things he’s done, the potential he had and the mistakes he’s make, the goodness and forgiveness he could still have if he can only make things right. Aaron’s face is careworn, the only scars left on his shoulder and back are faint and faded reminders of the IED a lifetime ago. 

“Aaron. Ken.” Clint’s whisper is more urgent now.

“Mmmm?” Aaron rolls over in his sleep.

Clint brushes a strand of hair from his forehead and remembers back when they were kids. Most people thought Ken didn’t understand anything that was happening, just because he didn’t speak, at least not in proper words. Clint could usually figure out what he was trying to say. “I know it hurts, but you have to wake up now.”

“Did’t work?” Aaron mumbles. 

“Yeah, yeah it did.” Clint hopes it’s true. 

Aaron’s eye opens blearily, unfocussed on Clint’s face. “Clint?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“Mm’dreaming.”

“Probably are.”

He reaches for Clint’s hand. Back when they were kids he was only comfortable when he was holding it. He’d whine and pout and panic when he was left alone. He never understood why Clint had to leave to perform, why he couldn’t follow. He never understood why they kept moving from place to place. Clint swallows the old guilt. The state home was the best, most stable place for him to grow up. He wasn’t going to let his brother be a sideshow at the circus; the halfwit with perfect aim. 

“Thought I made you up.”

“Should probably go back to thinking that.”

“Name never on th’paperwork. No brother.”

“I know.”

“Said I d’n’t have family.” He rolls over and drifts away again.

“I’m sorry. Aaron? Aaron, you have to wake up, okay?”

“Virus. Tired. Did’t work?”

“Yeah it did. It is working now. You're going to wake up and feel like yourself again.” Outside, he can hear sirens approaching, voices that reek of authority down in the street. He knows LARX is out there and curses himself again for never finding a clean shot at the bastard. 

“This is the hardest part, you know. Leaving. But you can take care of yourself, now. You’re good at it, better than I ever was, and it’s not just the drugs. I've read your file. It’s all you. Hey, stay with me.”

Aaron mumbles something and grips his hand tighter. Clint begins to pry his fingers loose, one by one. He sets a bottle of water at the side of the bed. Aaron reaches for him. 

“Listen, you’re going to get out of here, and you’re going to keep Dr. Shearing safe. You just have to wake up.”

As he slips out of the room, he fires a single shot into the plywood over his brother’s head. It lands with a thud and quivers a moment. Aaron’s eyes shoot open and he sits up. 

~

“So that was… successful,” Tash says as they make their way back through the alleyways to the rendezvous. 

“Or something.”

She and Phil had worked their magic in making sure there was a ride waiting when Aaron finally crashed at the docks. They were always good at arranging miracles. Clint was better at killing things. His shoulders are tight and his quiver is light. He’d felt so much more than impotent watching the cops and the government assassin chase Aaron through the streets. He’d taken out the odd vehicle to open up a traffic lane or deter a tail, but beyond that, he knew he couldn’t make his presence known. Adrenaline was still pumping in his veins, but he knew she was right. Aaron and Shearing had gotten out. Found space to heal. No one was the wiser that he and Natasha had been there at all. Almost no one.

“You okay?” She squeezes his arm. “I’m not worried. Coulson is. You took out your earbud back there.” 

The thought of Phil pacing back at command is the first thing that makes him smile all day. Part of him wants to wrap his hands around the back of Phil’s neck and thank him with every part of his being. “He’s gonna take this one out of me, huh?”

“Well, he’s not going to let you just get away with it.”

For once, the thought of explaining it all, didn’t leave him in a cold sweat. Aaron was good, really good, at what he was doing. Hell, maybe they could even recruit him once the whole CIA mess was sorted out. 

Then she mutters quietly, “You also left a calling card.”

He hoped no one had noticed the arrow in the bedroom. Aaron had pulled it as he left and tucked it safely in his bag. 

Clint grinned. “You think he’ll figure it out?”

“I’d be disappointed if he didn’t. You are cut from the same cloth, after all.”

Clint’s smile grows wider as he hears the steady beat of chopper blades in the distance. “Yeah,” he says. “We are.”


End file.
